Last Letters From Monte Rosa (2010)

Release Date: August 6th, 2010

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Directed By: Ari Taub
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About Movie

Filmmaker Ari Taub spent eight years making Last Letters from Monte Rosa - longer than the war itself! The final product may be the year's unlikeliest indie: a low budget World War II drama in German and Italian shot partly in the NorthEastern United States and the rest in Northern Italy.

"I intended to finish it in one year," says Taub. "The shooting of the movie took five years because we were only able to raise enough money to shoot a week here, and two weeks there. We had to break it up over a long period of time".

With a final price tag of less than $300,000 dollars, the movie is obviously unable to compete with the high tech pyrotechnics of Saving Private Ryan, Flags of Our Fathers, but instead Taub focuses on the day-to- day lives of his soldier characters.

Taub used locations in Liguria, Italy, New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Indoor scenes were shot on sets built in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. More than two dozen German and Italian actors were flown in from Europe as funds became available. They were housed in Taub’s Williamsburg loft. “I had cots and mats set up,” he recalls. “It was like running an army camp!”

Taub’s collaborative approach was a breath of fresh air for his European cast. He credits this with much of their willingness to return again and to soldier with him through the obstacle course of low-budget filmmaking. Though the director speaks little Italian or German, he found it wasn’t a barrier to directing dialogue in those languages. “You learn to communicate through your eyes,” he says. “You don’t understand what they’re saying to you, but you can see what they’re saying, you can see the emotion through them”.